Night
by Fried Cheesecake
Summary: They come for her in the dead of the night.


**Night**

They come for her father in the dead of the night.

She remembers waking up to the sound of her mother's screams; pleading, _don't take him away, I have four children, I can't support them all on my own, don't you have kids, don't you understand_ and then she is sitting upright in bed, scrambling into the kitchen and throwing herself at the soldiers who drag her bloodied father out the door, laughing. Her mother dies two weeks later, and her unborn child with her, and so Marble is left to care for her three little brothers who gather around her and question where Mama and Papa have gone and she hits them when they ask stupid questions like that; an old man stops her in the street after witnessing her smack her brother across the face, and tells her that the people in the ranches are beaten like that, and does she want her brothers ending up like her father?

She stops after that, but it's hard to go on by herself; so she marries young and ends up pregnant after only a year. Her brothers drop out of school, and two of them join the local crime scene. The youngest stays around long after Marble's husband has abandoned her, but he dies of the same disease that kills one of her babies. The other twin, a little girl, cries constantly and there isn't enough food but Marble's finally found a joy in this world, so she raises her daughter as best she can, and she never hits her, never scolds her or reprimands her.

Her little girl grows into a woman and helps her mother run the goods store below their apartment. Marble fails to tell her daughter that the building was once a brothel, a whore house, where she worked for a spell in a pitiful attempt to earn a living for her siblings. Her daughter finds a man who treats her well, and the wedding is the most beautiful thing she's ever seen. Who cares if they don't have enough money for a proper wedding dress, or even flour to bake a cake? They sign their names, and two years later Marble is holding her granddaughter in her arms. She nearly forgets what it is like to be a peasant; what it is like to have no food to eat, to sleep in the rain and wake up with a chill because you don't have a place to live. She nearly forgets but she doesn't- her granddaughter is being raised in a warm house with two parents and enough food on table every night, but she tells Chocolat stories of growing up in the ghetto, of the Desians taking her father away. Marble's never been violent ever since that old man stopped her in street; but she scares her granddaughter with tales of horror. She makes her hate the Desians for everything they've done, and in a way, she realizes that she is living through Chocolat, taking out her revenge through her granddaughter.

They come for her in the dead of the night.

Cacao and Chocolat are at midnight mass, praying for the Chosen One, when they come for her. She is sleeping alone on her bed, happy, so happy with her family, and they come and take her away.

She isn't able to put up a fight. She's forced out of bed. Her hands are bound behind her back, and she is marched down the stairs into the streets where she joins a flock of fellow prisoners. They do not speak to each other; stare at the ground, pretend you're in a dream, don't make eye contact and most importantly, don't trip. One woman, several months pregnant, trips and falls; she is shot in the back of the head.

They are forced onto a boat one at time, the Desians poking them with the butts of their guns and muttering in their strange language to each other, laughing callously at the frightened looks on the prisoners' faces.

Marble takes one last look at Palmacosta as they sail away. The rope around her wrists burns her skin, but the tears she shed are not for herself. One day, she hopes Chocolat will tell her own children of how her grandmother was stolen away in the middle of the night. Perhaps, when the day comes that Chocolat has children of her own, perhaps the Desians will be gone from this land for good… perhaps she will be home again.


End file.
